Phife Dawg: Farewell to the Five-Foot Assassin With the Roughneck Business

“Linden Boulevard represent represent-zent / A Tribe Called Quest represent represent-zent / When the mic is in my hand, I’m never hesitant / My jam back in the day was ‘Eric B. for President.’ ” When the great Malik Isaac Taylor, known to us as Phife Dawg, who died last night, at forty-five, took the mic in a Tribe Called Quest song, we snapped to attention, smiling. One of the many pleasures of listening to their songs is hearing Phife rap, both by himself and when trading rhymes with Q-Tip. Q-Tip has a distinctive smooth-scratchy charm; Phife is no-nonsense. He jumps in to blow your mind and gets the job done. They met as young boys, and their rapport—the interplay between Q-Tip’s easy, buttery confidence and Phife’s assertive sharpness—is amazing to behold, comfortable and astonishing at once, right from the beginning. On the group’s 1990 début, “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm,” for example, they’re having a back-and-forth about breakfast foods on “Ham ’n’ Eggs”:

“Yo, Phife, do you eat ’em?”

“No, Tip, do you eat ’em?”

“Uh-uh, not at all.”

“Now drop the beat, so I can talk about my favorite tastings,” Phife says. Then he spits rhymes about beef jerky, Slim Jims, lemons, and limes.

Throughout their career, the members of A Tribe Called Quest—Q-Tip, Phife, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and, at times, Jarobi White—were named characters in their songs; to listeners, they felt like a family, a band of friends. Their music welcomed us easily, with irresistible beats and melodies, and the warmest, funniest rapping we’d ever heard. The tribe seemed generous enough to accommodate all of us. Their lyrics, which considered everything from road trips to sex to jazz to apartheid to love to the anatomy of poets, felt all-encompassing too.

Phife had some of their best and funniest lines, impossible not to try yourself. He kicks off the satisfying second track on the 1991 masterpiece “The Low End Theory” with the immortal “Yo! Microphone check, one two what is this? / The five-foot assassin with the roughneck business.” Phife was five feet three. “I never half-step ‘cause I’m not a half-stepper / Drink a lot of soda so they call me Dr. Pepper.” If you’re young, you might not fully appreciate the dis “Hey, yo, Bo knows this / and Bo knows that / but Bo don’t know jack, ‘cause Bo can’t rap,” but if you were a teen-ager in the Bo Jackson Nike-ad era, and you woke up to this poster on your freshman-year roommate’s wall every morning, it was especially delicious.

Phife struggled with health problems for decades. “When’s the last time you heard a funky diabetic?” he raps on “Oh My God,” on “Midnight Marauders,” from 1993. He had a kidney transplant in 2008. That his health problems were known, and well documented in the 2011 documentary “Beats, Rhymes, and Life,” didn’t make the news of his death any less shocking. Grieving is ongoing, in various forms of buggin’ out. Listening to him ask, sweetly, “Mr. Dinkins, will you please be my mayor?” on “Can I Kick It?” feels especially poignant somehow. It’s an earnest question. But when it’s his turn to ask “Can I kick it?,” it’s just politeness. Yes, he could.

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyor­ker.com.